(For those of you who were wondering just what I meant when I wished everyone a happy Bloomsday here is the explanation. The novel Ulysses takes place on June 16th (a date chosen by Joyce because that is he when he first met his wife, Nora Barnacle) and it is tradition in Dublin and amongst all hyper-literate people to spend the day celebrating the greatest novel ever written. In Dublin people trace out the exact route the characters take throughout the day (I’ve walked parts of it when I’ve been there.) On my way to work I drive past this prep school and today I saw a man dressed like James Joyce. Made me happy or at least mildly content to be in Delaware.)
I am aghast at all of these spurious claims that My Beloved Lindsay stole jewelry from the set of a photo shoot. Think of all the other possibilities. What about the photographer or the makeup artists? What about the possibility of a team of elite, highly attractive, female cat burglars entering the building, stealing the jewelry via a string of intricate acrobatic maneuvers, and escaping unnoticed? It’s like people think Lindsay would just walk off the set with a bunch of diamonds just so she could pawn them for drug money. Come on, how likely is that?
Ok, I was just flipping around the web searching for music to listen to while I write and just found out that one of my favorite websites ever, fabchannel.com, went under three months ago. This is horrible news for me. Fabchannel was one of those sites that made sitting in an office in Kansas bearable. Their concept was incredibly simple. They would film concerts in Amsterdam with high quality video and audio and post the full concerts online. They had an advertisement or two in the mix when you called up the concert and several links to buy the CD on Amazon but that was about as intrusive as it got. Sadly, the constant fighting with the record labels have proven too much and they have been forced to shut down.
This to me is just a big sign as to how stupid the music industry is at the moment. This was a wonderful set of relatively cheap promotion just sitting out there and they end up just tossing it away. These are shows that the average consumer was never going to see so it is not as though that they were risking ticket sales. Obviously if the show sucked they would have the right to pull it to protect their band’s image. They would even have a complete, professional grade, concert to release on DVD if they so desired. I spent hours listening to The Frames, Josh Ritter, Damien Rice and Arcade Fire on this site. I became bigger fans of all of those acts as a result and have seen them all in concert. That is how you promote music in the new media landscape.
I wish that there would be a better venue for really high quality music to be presented to the public. I mean in the 120 Minutes sense of the term. One show, one location on the web where there is just a dedicated stream of new and interesting music. Thanks to the Long Tail it is so hard to find music that is good because there is just so much stuff out there. First person who figures out a way to that will become very wealthy indeed.
1 comment:
The thing that got people hooked on MTV was its ability to have music playing when other shows were in commercials. There is something about seeing something fed live thats allows people to connect with it and the communal nature of other people connecting to it.
You could literally watch MTV from 3PM when school got out to 10 PM off and on see every band that mattered in pop music and related genres. Things are so disjointed nowadays its difficult to figure out what is in fact going on in music. The best thing I have seen is Satellite because they are broken up into genres but have infinitely wider playlists, few commercials, and fewer FCC restrictions.
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